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- Title
The Captains and Crews of Liverpool's Northern Whaling Trade.
- Authors
Jordan, Kate
- Abstract
A large amount of research has been conducted on Liverpool's involvement in the slave and colonial trades, but some of its other maritime trades, like whaling, have been largely ignored. Moreover, little attention has been devoted to the interaction of whaling captains and crews with their home port. Both of these exclusions can be traced to inadequate or disparate sources. The Liverpool northern whalers provide a perfect opportunity to explore a smaller Liverpool trade, the interaction of whaling men with their home port and how to manage disparate sources. The issue of disparate sources was solved though a database that drew together five key types of records to build the "Liverpool Whaling Database," which contains over four hundred voyages. An analysis of this database and the diary of William Scoresby, Jr., showed that whaling and Liverpool's economic and geographic position combined to produce men who were surprisingly unaffected by mortality, impressment or enemy capture. In return, whaling crews, due to their sheer weight of numbers, had an adverse effect on the Liverpool labour market, flooding it with unemployed men when they returned home each autumn. In particularly bad years, such an influx resulted in rioting. Captains, by comparison, had little effect on Liverpool but could easily move into other trades. This note, while providing interesting findings on the Liverpool's whaling captains and crews, is also an example of how valuable computer databases can be in the study of maritime history.
- Subjects
LIVERPOOL (England); ENGLAND; WHALING; WHALERS (Persons); WHALERS' writings; IMPRESSMENT; MANNING of ships; LEGAL status of sailors; SAILORS; SOCIAL conditions in England; HISTORY; MATHEMATICAL models; EIGHTEENTH century; LOCAL history
- Publication
International Journal of Maritime History, 2010, Vol 22, Issue 1, p185
- ISSN
0843-8714
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/084387141002200111